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This is awesome - what would be the remaining use case/advantage for using an AMI when you can now snapshot to more widely supported formats and import them? Edit: Oh, this is windows only, significantly less exciting. I wonder why linux isn't supported?
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I would love to hear more about the real barrier to migration: the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. Who cares if you can move your app server to VMWare, if it needs low-latency access to 10TB of data sitting in amazon-us-east?
This is a useful tool, but spinning it as a victory against vendor lock-in is disingenuous. VM formats are well-documented and do not constitute a barrier to migration by any stretch of the imagination. I would love to hear more about the real barrier to migration: the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. Who cares if you can move your app server to VMWare, if it needs low-latency access to 10TB…
As you say, the other difficulty is copying gigabytes of data across clouds. My colleague at Red Hat wrote snap[2] which can turn Linux guests into digests (basically a base distro name and list of packages and list of config changes), so this can be reduced massively. We're currently extending this work to support Windows and more Linux guest types.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder why linux isn't supported? Linux runs on EC2 via Xen/PV, which is a kernel-hypervisor interface not provided by other (non-Xen) virtualization systems. Exporting linux AMIs would require reaching inside your filesystem and modifying your kernel, which is far outside of the scope of anything Amazon would want to do (both in terms of "really complicated" and "liable to accidentally break things"). The same app…
Kernel isn't a big deal, Colin. An entire filesystem should boot the same when exported. If you rsync / elsewhere, twiddle a few knobs like network config then reboot, you should be able to move an Amazon image anywhere. I have successfully done this between disparate virtualization providers, and Xen to dedicated. Amazon is unique in that they use PV-Grub everywhere to boot a customer filesystem kernel (newer behavi…
I'm betting you were running Xen/HVM then. (Most people do, these days.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kernel isn't a big deal, Colin. An entire filesystem should boot the same when exported. If you rsync / elsewhere, twiddle a few knobs like network config then reboot, you should be able to move an Amazon image anywhere. I have successfully done this between disparate virtualization providers, and Xen to dedicated. Amazon is unique in that they use PV-Grub everywhere to boot a customer filesystem kernel (newer behavi…
I have successfully done this between disparate virtualization providers, and Xen to dedicated. I'm betting you were running Xen/HVM then. (Most people do, these days.)
Maybe Amzn is just not too skilled working with various bootloaders?
Let's hope they support Linux exports soon then. This solves another problem as well, which is easily moving images around availability zones.
This is a useful tool, but spinning it as a victory against vendor lock-in is disingenuous. VM formats are well-documented and do not constitute a barrier to migration by any stretch of the imagination. I would love to hear more about the real barrier to migration: the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. Who cares if you can move your app server to VMWare, if it needs low-latency access to 10TB…
AWS Direct Connect might help with that. Anyone have any experience with it?
"AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections."
This is a useful tool, but spinning it as a victory against vendor lock-in is disingenuous. VM formats are well-documented and do not constitute a barrier to migration by any stretch of the imagination. I would love to hear more about the real barrier to migration: the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. Who cares if you can move your app server to VMWare, if it needs low-latency access to 10TB…
This is awesome - what would be the remaining use case/advantage for using an AMI when you can now snapshot to more widely supported formats and import them? Edit: Oh, this is windows only, significantly less exciting. I wonder why linux isn't supported?
I wonder why linux isn't supported? Linux runs on EC2 via Xen/PV, which is a kernel-hypervisor interface not provided by other (non-Xen) virtualization systems. Exporting linux AMIs would require reaching inside your filesystem and modifying your kernel, which is far outside of the scope of anything Amazon would want to do (both in terms of "really complicated" and "liable to accidentally break things"). The same app…
But you're right that Amazon isn't really interested in doing that work for you. Linux people who really need this are no doubt already doing it.